In the US, state governments have a great deal of control over public spending on healthcare, partly through programs like Medicare and Medicaid. As a result, healthcare spending is not uniform across the country. These differences are illustrated in the map below where healthcare expenditure by state is presented in millions of dollars and black dots represent the 500 cities used in our analysis.

This map suggests that there very well may be regional differences in healthcare spending. Exploring this question shows clear graphical differences in regional spending:

Further analysis shows that there is a statistically significant difference between regions:

term estimate std.error statistic p.value
(Intercept) 7577.1538 296.0410 25.594946 0.0000000
regionSouth 493.8462 393.2675 1.255751 0.2154132
regionMidwest 927.5128 427.2984 2.170644 0.0350430
regionNortheast 2108.8462 462.8518 4.556202 0.0000371
term df sumsq meansq statistic p.value
region 3 25422970 8474323 7.43803 0.0003559
Residuals 47 53548214 1139324 NA NA